1. Media and Pedagogical
Normativity
Dr. Norm Friesen

2. Overview
• Media = “talk and action,” reading & writing,
technical media
• Normativity = performance standards & the
“common good” affirmed in Bildung
• Two traditions:
– Media as neutral, particularly inside the classroom
– Media as constitutive of the good and values of
education from the start

3. [I] did myself, by the understanding
which Thou, my God, gavest me,
practice the sounds in my memory.
Then they named anything, and as
they spoke turned towards it, I saw
and remembered that they called what
they would point out by the name they
uttered.... By repeatedly hearing words
in particular positions in various
sentences, I gradually learned which
things the various words stood for;
and having acclimated my mouth to
these signs, I thereby gave utterance
to my will.

6. be clear, and by that, firm
and solid, if whatever is
taught and learned, be not
obscure, or confused, but
apparent, distinct, and
articulate, as the fingers on
the hands. The ground of this
business, is that sensual
objects may be rightly
presented to the senses, for
fear they may not be
received.

7. I say, and say it again
aloud, that this last is
the foundation of all
the rest: because we
can neither act nor
speak wisely, unless
we first rightly under-
stand all the things
which are to be done,
and whereof we are to
speak.

14. • Modality principle: People learn better from
animation and narration than from animation and
on-screen text.
• Redundancy principle: People learn better from
animation and narration than from animation,
narration, and on-screen text.
• Coherence principle: People learn better when
extraneous words, pictures, and sounds are
excluded rather than included.
• Spatial contiguity principle: People learn better
when corresponding words and pictures are
presented near rather than far from each other on
the page or screen.

15. writing is inferior to speech. For it is like a picture,
which can give no answer to a question, and has only
a deceitful likeness of a living creature. It has no
power of adaptation, but uses the same words for all.
It is not a legitimate son of knowledge, but a bastard,
and when an attack is made upon this bastard
neither parent nor anyone else is there to defend it.
The husbandman will not seriously incline to sow his
seed in such a hot–bed or garden of Adonis; he will
rather sow in the natural soil of the human soul
which has depth of earth

16. three ways of writing correspond
almost exactly to three different
stages according to which one
can consider men gathered into
a nation. The depicting of objects
is appropriate to a savage
people; signs of words and of
propositions, to a barbaric
people; and the alphabet to
civilized people. (1966, 17)

17. for 2500 years the philosophers of the
Western world have excluded all technology
from the matter-form in entelechy treatment.
Innis spent much of his life trying to explain
how Greek culture had been destroyed by
writing and its effects on their oral tradition.
Innis also spent much of his life trying to
draw attention to the psychic and social
consequences of technologies. It did not
occur to him that our philosophy
systematically excludes t e c h n e from its
meditations. Only natural and living forms
are classified as hylo-morphic. (Letters)

18. …the ground rules according to which reality is constructed for
children are not simply changed; instead, a whole new system
of rules emerges. Culture is no longer presented to the child
as a seamless whole, but only in part. The part that is
presented is offered through a kind of pedagogical rehearsal
or practice, as it would be for someone from a foreign land. …
the realm of schooling consists of a huge montage of images
and representations which are not “the things themselves” but
that instead “point out” things and phenomena. Our
educational system would descend into chaos if our schools
were suddenly emptied of …all educational [images and
illustrations,] all “academic subjects” and textbooks –
including forms of representation such as this book. This
[constitutes the] massive arsenal of educational contents,
methods and aims, through which modern educational
practice has evolved.